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New Scientist Live

Monday’s bright supermoon will be closest to Earth in 68 years

Get ready for syzygy

GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images

By Lisa Grossman

Take a closer look. On Monday night, 14 November, the full moon will be the closest to Earth that it has been in nearly 70 years. This event, sometimes called a supermoon, means the moon will be a bit bigger and brighter than it normally appears. It will be worth checking it out – but scientists warn that it might not look all that different than your average full moon.

Full moons happen when the sun, the Earth and the moon are all lined up in a row – a phenomenon called a syzygy. A full moon is super when the moon is at the point in its elliptical orbit when it is at perigee, or its closest point to the Earth. That gives supermoons the fanciful name “perigee-syzygy”.

This particular supermoon really is a superlative one. At 8:09 pm GMT, the moon will be 356,511 kilometres from Earth – the closest it has come since 1948. It won’t be that close again until November 2034.

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Supermoons are typically about 30 per cent larger in area and 30 per cent brighter than the full moons that happen when the moon is at its furthest. But this difference might be hard to tell just by looking, especially when the moon is high in the sky.

Although the moon is responsible for the Earth’s tides, the effects of a supermoon on the Earth are minor. We’re also in a run of supermoons: there was one on 16 October, and there will be another on 14 December. So if it’s cloudy this month, you don’t have long to wait to see another one.